COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was one of the earliest high-level programming languages.

COBOL was developed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL). This committee was a formed by a joint effort of industry, major universities, and the United States Government. This committee completed the specifications for COBOL as the year of 1959 came to an end.

These were then approved by the Executive Committee in January 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which edited and printed these specifications as Cobol60.

COBOL was developed within a six month period, and yet is still in use over 40 years later.

Since 1960, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) was responsible for developing new COBOL standards.

Three ANSI standards for COBOL have been produced: in 1968, 1974 and 1985.

Object-oriented COBOL is the fourth edition in the continuing evolution of ANSI/ISO standard COBOL.

The government contributed to COBOL’s initial popularity by insisting that computers sold or leased to the government had to have COBOL software available.